Benedict’s Babeldom

On Thursday Alex pointed out something funny that had happened to the high score board:

The large text was a link to this blog post. How had they figured out the servlet’s address and the parameters that need to be passed in?! Then I saw this:

	<!--
	<p>Enter your high score:</p>
	<form action="/sign" method="post">
		<div>
			Name: <input type="text" name="name" />
			<br />
			Score: <input type="text" name="score" />
		</div>
		<div><input type="submit" value="Post Score" /></div>
	</form>
	-->

I had forgotten to delete some test code that I had written! The code provided an an input for name and score, and then you could submit it. I was handing people a method for inserting high scores to the board.

I deleted the large post, giving the person some credit at the bottom of the scoreboard. I’m starting to think that a lot of the other highest scores were created that way, but no one else pointed out the flaw. I’m considering a move to weekly high scores so that it’s more competitive, and I don’t feel bad about deleting the current high scores. I’m going to have a talk with Alex about it, and try to whip up some GQL to make the whole process automated.

I’ve been trying to start a small project to teach myself ruby. Unfortunately, I decided to do this right when _why disappeared from the internet. I had been planning on using Shoes, his ruby gui toolkit, but all his sites disappearing has made it a bit more difficult.

I spent a couple days wrestling with getting everything working. It retrospect it took an embarrassing amount of time once I knew what to do, but when isn’t that the case? Here’s the steps I took in case anyone else is interested. I did this on Ubuntu, so I use apt-get. For other os’s, check the why repository mirror on github at http://github.com/whymirror.

1) sudo apt-get install ruby-full :: I was missing some dependencies required for shoes when I didn’t get the full ruby install the first time I installed it. I spent a lot of time hunting around for what I was missing, but this seemed to take care of everything.

2) sudo apt-get install shoes :: I originally downloaded shoes off of the github mirror, but using apt-get makes the process much simpler.

From there I recommend reading why’s shoes tutorial/guide/novel, “nobody knows shoes”. This guide disappeared along with everything else related to why, but it has been reposted in other places. This post has download links for both “why’s poignant guide to ruby” and “nobody knows shoes.”